India’s IDBI Bank reported a sharp fall in quarterly profit as a one-off gain dropped out of the comparison. At the IMF and World Bank meetings in Bangkok, officials warned of a vast jobs gap and fading economic buffers, Washington explained its pause on Russia sanctions and an IMF director credited artificial intelligence with lifting South Korea.
IDBI Bank profit falls 39 per cent without last year’s one-off gain as lending grows
IDBI Bank, one of India’s large commercial lenders, said on Saturday that its net profit for the quarter to the end of September 2026 dropped 39 per cent from a year earlier, to Rs 2,205 crore from Rs 3,627 crore. The bank’s results attribute the decline mainly to the absence of a one-time gain of Rs 1,699 crore that it booked in the same quarter last year from selling part of its holding in the National Securities Depository. Without that item in the earlier figures, profit would have risen by about 14 per cent, the bank’s numbers show. The missing gain pulled non-interest income down 46 per cent to Rs 1,353 crore, against Rs 2,489 crore a year before. Operating profit also slipped, falling 18 per cent year on year to Rs 2,893 crore, while operating costs climbed 19 per cent to Rs 2,688 crore from Rs 2,252 crore.
The core lending business performed more steadily. Net interest income, the gap between what the bank earns on loans and pays on deposits, grew 29 per cent to Rs 4,228 crore. The net interest margin, a standard gauge of how profitably a bank lends, widened to 4.11 per cent from 3.71 per cent twelve months earlier. Net advances rose 18 per cent to about Rs 2.71 trillion from Rs 2.30 trillion, and deposits went up 17 per cent to roughly Rs 3.55 trillion from Rs 3.03 trillion. Asset quality held up, with the net ratio of non-performing assets easing to 0.17 per cent from 0.21 per cent. The figures came only a few days after the Indian government approved the sale of a controlling 60.72 per cent stake in the bank to Canada’s Fairfax group in a deal valued at Rs 52,878 crore.
IDBI began life on July 1, 1964, when the Indian government set it up under its own act as a development finance institution wholly owned by the Reserve Bank of India, with the job of funding industry. In 2005 it merged with its commercial banking arm and was classed as a public sector bank. After years of high bad loans and weak capital, the government asked the state-run Life Insurance Corporation of India in 2019 to inject funds and manage the bank, and once the insurer held 51 per cent the central bank reclassified IDBI as a private sector lender. It was placed under the central bank’s corrective action framework and left it in March 2021. Several national bodies, including the securities regulator and the National Stock Exchange, trace their origins to IDBI, which today runs more than 2,100 branches and 3,700 cash machines.
World Bank and IMF warn of an 800 million job shortfall in the coming 15 years
The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have warned that the world could fall about 800 million jobs short over the next 10 to 15 years and urged governments to draw in private investment to widen employment, above all in developing countries. World Bank Group President Ajay Banga set out the figures on Friday at the institutions’ 2026 annual meetings in Bangkok, Thailand. Around 1.2 billion young people in developing economies are expected to reach working age over that period, while only about 400 million jobs are projected to be available for them. Banga said the gap was a forecast rather than a fixed outcome and that governments and their development partners could still change it. He warned that failing to act would carry heavy economic and social costs, while more employment would lift household incomes, living standards and stability, and he said a job meant dignity for the person who held it.
Banga said heavy debt payments, high living costs and competing priorities were limiting how much governments can spend on roads, power, health and schools. He proposed a mix of public money, private capital, philanthropy and technology, tailored to each country, with concessional finance still needed where risks deter investors. By his account, the private money the World Bank Group helped attract grew more than threefold, to $112 billion in the most recent financial year from roughly $35 billion in 2022, and that total funding passed $230 billion once the group’s own lending was added. He named infrastructure and energy, agribusiness, health care, tourism and manufacturing as priority sectors, and said six multilateral development banks were building shared ways to package projects so other investors can buy them. IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva urged indebted countries to adopt credible medium-term plans to cut deficits while protecting vulnerable households.
The World Bank Group describes itself as the largest development bank in the world. It is a family of five international organisations headquartered in Washington that make loans to developing countries, and its stated goals are ending extreme poverty and building shared prosperity. The original World Bank was created together with the International Monetary Fund at the Bretton Woods conference in July 1944, and its first loans helped rebuild countries ruined by the Second World War before its focus moved to development. Over the following decades the group added the International Finance Corporation in 1956, the International Development Association in 1960, a centre for settling investment disputes in 1965 and an investment guarantee agency in 1988. It has 189 member states, and its president has traditionally been an American. The bank has faced criticism over its structural adjustment programmes and its environmental record.
IMF steering committee says world economy’s protective buffers have worn thin
The International Monetary and Financial Committee, which steers the work of the International Monetary Fund, warned at its 54th meeting in Bangkok that wars, supply disruptions and trade frictions were adding to uncertainty and pushing up prices, with the heaviest burden falling on the poorest countries. Its chair, Saudi Finance Minister Mohammed Al-Jadaan, said stronger economic and financial resilience, closer cooperation and an end to conflicts were needed for lasting growth. In its closing statement, the committee said the world economy had absorbed a run of recent shocks better than expected, but that the cushions which made this possible had shrunk, so that further resilience could not be taken for granted. It listed escalating conflicts, sharper trade disputes, rising public debt and the cost of refinancing that debt as the main threats, and said risks to the outlook were tilted to the downside.
The committee said higher government bond yields in the largest economies could tighten financial conditions worldwide, given how much debt many states need to roll over. It added that rapid progress in artificial intelligence was already supporting investment and trade and could raise productivity, although the gains have been uneven and low-income and fragile states risk falling further behind. Members called on governments to tackle fiscal weaknesses urgently through credible medium-term plans while shielding vulnerable groups and growth-friendly investment. The statement stressed that central bank independence underpins confidence in monetary policy, and it called for secure energy flows and freedom of navigation. The committee welcomed a set of measures called the Bangkok Blueprint on digital finance, cyber resilience and online fraud, urged completion of approvals for the latest quota increase and extended Al-Jadaan’s term as chair by one year.
The International Monetary Fund was founded on July 22, 1944, and is based in Washington, with 191 member countries made up of 190 United Nations members and Kosovo. Kristalina Georgieva is its managing director and Silvana Tenreyro its chief economist. The Fund’s board of governors, which in practice delegates most of its powers to the executive board, is advised by two bodies: the International Monetary and Financial Committee, which has 24 members and monitors global liquidity and the flow of resources to developing countries, and a separate Development Committee. Under the Fund’s quota system, each member pays into a common pool from which countries facing balance-of-payments problems can borrow, and the size of a country’s quota also sets its voting power. Loans usually come with conditions requiring policy reforms, and the Fund also gives technical assistance and monitors its members’ economies, a role that has drawn criticism when loan terms imposed austerity.
Rubio describes Russia sanctions waiver as 60-day pause to study economic effects
The decision by President Donald Trump to waive a broad package of sanctions and tariffs on Russia amounts to a 60-day pause while the administration studies their effect on the world economy, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Saturday. Trump signed the executive order on Friday, two days before the measures, approved by Congress in September, were to take effect, prompting criticism from both parties. Rubio said the president wanted to use the period to analyse what imposing both the sanctions and the tariffs would mean for the global economy and for the United States, adding that the restrictions affected a number of countries and not only Russia. He linked the decision to energy markets, saying that several conflicts, including the US war with Iran and Houthi attacks on Saudi Arabia, were driving up the price of oil and diesel and starting to weigh on economies around the world.
Trump said late on Saturday that the decision would benefit the United States and the world, although it was not clear whether he had reached a final view. The order followed an agreement with Russian President Vladimir Putin to allow Russian diesel exports in return for an easing of sanctions. Rubio argued that the fuel would have reached world markets anyway and that the only question was how much of it the United States would obtain, pointing to the role of diesel in trucking, farming and construction. Diesel price rises linked to the Iran war are reaching American consumers ahead of next month’s midterm elections. Republican Senator Thom Tillis called the move beyond irresponsible and said energy prices would fall faster if the Iran conflict were resolved, while Senator Ted Cruz called it a mistake. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said the waiver rewards Putin.
The law that Trump has now paused was passed by Congress in September and signed by the president himself. It targeted Russian officials, wealthy business figures and financial institutions, as well as the tankers known as the shadow fleet that Moscow uses to get around existing embargoes, and it gave the president powers to impose tariffs of up to 100 per cent on goods from the five largest buyers of Russian oil and gas, chiefly China and India. Its stated aim was to cut off funding for Putin’s allies and for the war in Ukraine. Relations between Washington and Kyiv had already grown strained after the United States agreed the previous week to import Russian diesel, and Ukraine has accused the administration of scaling back military support. Russian envoy Kirill Dmitriev welcomed the suspension, saying the sanctions would have caused serious damage to American and global markets.
IMF official says artificial intelligence investment is carrying South Korea’s growth
South Korea is coping with a difficult global environment because of the boom in artificial intelligence, and the investment cycle behind it is unlikely to slow soon, an executive director of the International Monetary Fund said in Bangkok. Choi Ji-young, who heads the Fund’s Asia and the Pacific constituency office, told reporters that trade tensions were weighing on the world economy, naming the conflict in the Middle East and Russia’s war in Ukraine as lasting causes of uncertainty. Even so, the Fund earlier this week raised its 2026 growth forecast for South Korea to 3.3 per cent, 0.7 percentage points above its July estimate. The upgrade reflects strong semiconductor exports driven by demand for artificial intelligence infrastructure, which more than offset the damage from the war in the Middle East, according to the Fund. Choi was in Thailand for the annual meetings of the Fund and the World Bank Group.
Choi said investment linked to artificial intelligence was likely to continue for a long time, because building data centres can take around a decade and spending has only just started. He added that the Fund still sees serious downside risks: should the boom falter, South Korea could face a stock market correction, a shift in its current account and harm to its companies. Choi said the boom had given the government more room to invest in future growth, which sets the country apart from many others, and advised fast-growing economies such as South Korea not to focus too narrowly on debt-to-GDP ratios but to keep investing in innovation. He said Fund staff agreed the country should continue raising its growth potential. He also said the Fund viewed positively the structure of a planned Future Fund, which the government intends to launch next year with windfall revenue from the chip cycle.
South Korea has the fourth-largest economy in Asia and the 13th-largest in the world, with a nominal output of about $1.87 trillion as of 2025. Its transformation from an underdeveloped country into a high-income economy within a few decades is widely known as the Miracle on the Han River, and it allowed the country to join both the OECD and the G20. Seoul adopted an export-led development strategy in the 1960s, and by 2022 the country was the ninth-largest exporter and importer in the world. It spends about 4.93 per cent of its output on research and development across many sectors of the economy. International lenders, the Fund among them, have long pointed to its low state debt and large fiscal reserves as sources of resilience, and it was one of the few developed economies to avoid a recession during the global financial crisis of 2008 and 2009.